Most students now have occasional, supplementary Internet access at school, which has been sufficient to enable the initial growth of a large, diverse market of hardware, services, and content. However, within the tethered desktop or laptop paradigm, school access is unlikely to drop from the present 6:1 student-to-computer ratio to an ideal 1:1 ratio because of cost, installation, and portability issues. Hence, students will need to share a limited number of computers while at school and suffer from a lack of continuity between their computing environment at school and what they have at home (more than 60% of school-aged children now have access to a computer at home). This hardware shortage restricts individual access to school computing to less than 1 hour a week, on average, thus limiting students' opportunities to gain the highly-touted benefits of educational computing.
The market is rapidly developing affordable, powerful handheld computing devices and fast, easily installed, low-power wireless networks that may allow schools to overcome these limitations. In particular, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are becoming readily available and highly attractive to schools for their low cost, ease of installation, and minimal maintenance. MANETs have a superset of the 802.11 capabilities that are available today: such networks support multicast, allow direct peer-to-peer communications without going through a central access point, support ad hoc networking, and provide an API (application programming interface) for controlling some key performance parameters.
A critical barrier to the acceptance of handheld (and wireless) devices in educational settings is the perception that the devices will enable disruptive “message passing” among students or cheating on tests. To overcome this barrier, teachers and proctors need a way of monitoring and blocking inappropriate student communication or computation. More generally, teachers need ways both of enabling particular kinds and patterns of communication and disabling others. In addition, because students can move around, and can work together in settings both inside different schoolrooms and outside of school altogether, controlled patterns of communication should be enabled without requiring a central communication hub, filter, or monitor. (Such a hub presents a single point of failure.) Further, it should be easy for teachers to designate particular roles for particular students without becoming network system administrators. Finally, it would be convenient if the process of choosing a particular destination for content was automated or simplified, so that students need not navigate complex choices to send or receive planned information flows.